There was the old look of patient affection in her tender face, and there was another look, too, which Mat could not misunderstand. It was a look of wistful appeal, half-uttered question, of a fond but tremulous hope.
And it added to the misery of that dark hour that Mat could say nothing, and that he had to let that true and deeply-loved soul pass out of life with its greatest fear unsatisfied, and its brightest hope unassured. For Mat could not utter a decisive word.
Between him and the speech there stood two shadows, potent, dark, and resistless—his mother pointing to her workbox, and Reed pointing to a revolver.
Mary stood beside the bed tearless.
"Doesn't Mary bear up well?" said Mat in surprise to her blubbering father.
"Mary doesn't cry," said her father; "she frets," and in these words Mat thought the whole character of the girl was summed up.
Mrs. Flaherty died on Thursday; the polling was on the following day. Mat was still under the impression of the dark and painful scene when the new excitement came. He hoped against hope to the last, went about the town like one insane, and spoke in his passion of country even to O'Flynn, the pawn-broker, and of honor to Mat Fleming, and then waited at the closing hour to hear the result. The result was:—
Mat turned pale, and almost fell, his head swam, his heart seemed for a moment to have stopped. He would not yet acknowledge it in so many words; but the sentence still kept ringing in his ears, "Thy doom is sealed, thy doom is sealed."
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE STORY OF BETTY CUNNINGHAM
The disaster which swept over all Ireland through the final success of the treachery of Crowe raged soon after in Ballybay. The town had been reduced by successive misfortunes to a condition so abject that one calamity was sufficient to completely submerge the greater portion of its inhabitants. Mr. Anthony Cosgrave, J. P., signalized the event by driving out the few tenants who still remained on the properties he had bought. He turned all his land into pasture, for this was the prosperous era of the graziers, and cattle were rapidly transformed into gold. Other landlords pursued similar courses, and within a couple of years, ten thousand people had been swept from the neighborhood around.
The calamity reached down to the very lowest stratum, and touched depths so profound as the fortunes of the widow Cunningham and her daughter Betty.
It had now become habitual for the widow and her daughter to remain for a couple of days with barely any food. One night they were sitting opposite each other on the bare floor of the railway arch in which they had for several years found refuge, staring at each other with the blank, wild gaze of hunger. There was a terrible pang at the heart of the mother on this night of nights. Throughout all her long years of struggle two great thoughts still remained burning in her soul, and in spite of poverty and hunger that soul still remained afire. One was vengeance on Cosgrave for the long train of woes through which she herself had passed, and the other was the protection of her child.
With that profound reverence for female honor which is still one of the best characteristics of the Irish poor, she had seen the growth of her beautiful daughter with a love mixed with terror, and guarded her child as the tigress watches by her lair. Her own life had long since ceased to be dear to her. She walked for hours through the streets, she pleaded for custom, she smiled under insult, she bore rain and hail and snow, in hope of the fulfilment of this great passionate purpose—to keep her daughter pure.
The misery of the last six months had been aggravated by the dread, growing in intensity with every hour, that all this endurance would be in vain, that behind the wolf of hunger there stalked the more cruel wolf of lust, and that her daughter was doomed. On this subject not a word passed between the two women, for the delicacy of feeling which marks even the humblest grade of Irish life sealed their lips; but the dread was always there in the mother's heart, pursuing her as a nightmare through the long watches of the darkness, and haunting her every moment as wearily she carried her basket through the streets in the day.
"Buy a few apples, yer honor, for God's sake," she often said to a passer-by, in a tone that might have struck one as menacing, or at least as entirely disproportionate to the urgency of the appeal; but in every such prayer for pence the mother felt that she was crying for her child, and her child's soul, and her accents came from the very anguish of her mother's heart.
On this night—it was about a month after the election of Crowe—the two sat together, buried in their own sad thoughts. They were suddenly aroused by the floor becoming inundated, and at once knew what to expect. The Shannon periodically rose above its banks outside Ballybay, and then its waters overspread the "Big Meadows," and the railway arch underneath which the widow and her daughter had taken refuge was, as will be remembered, close to these Meadows.
They rose and rushed from the spot. They were now absolutely homeless, without even a place on which to lay their heads. They went further on to another railway arch, and at last slept. When the mother awoke in the morning she was alone.
At this period a Ballybay landlord, afterwards destined to figure largely in the social life of Ireland, had just come of age. Thomas McNaghten was perhaps the handsomest Irishman of his day; tall, broad-shouldered, muscular. He had a physique as splendid as that of the race of peasants from whom his father sprang; while from the gentler race of his mother he derived features of exquisite delicacy and the complexion of a lily-like pink and white. He afterwards ran a career of mad dissipation that made his name a by-word even among the reckless and debauched class to which he belonged, and died a paralytic before he was forty. But at the period of our story, he was still in the full strength and the first flush of manhood. He had cast his eyes on Betty Cunningham, and had held out to her bribes that seemed to unfold to the girl visions of untold wealth. The innate purity of the maiden had hitherto been proof against the direct influences of poverty and wretchedness and the advances of her tempter. But at last the combined intensities of hunger and despair became his allies.
Three weeks after her desertion of her mother Betty Cunningham was drunk in one of the public-houses, which were frequented by the soldiers quartered in Ballybay. The fatal progress of the Irish girl who has fallen is more rapid than in any other country. Society, always cruel to its hapless victims and its outcasts, in Ireland is fanatically and barbarously savage. Betty was driven out from every house! People shuddered as she passed. She lay under hedges, her bed was often in the snow. To Ballybay she was as much an object of loathing and of horror as though she were some wild beast that men might lawfully destroy.
The girl herself had no compensation for all this dread outlawry. The Traviatas of other lands are painted for us in gilded saloons, with costly wines in golden goblets, and noble lovers sighing for their smiles. But Betty, outcast, hungry, and houseless, had not one second's enjoyment of life. The faith in which she had been trained still held its grip upon her, and neither vice nor drink nor human cruelty could relax its grasp. She was a sinner against Heaven's most sacred law; and after brief life came death, and after death eternal torment. Pursued by this ever-present spectre she drank and drank, and awoke more wretched than ever, and then she drank again.
She would sometimes seek refuge from her burning shame and from her tortured soul in fierce revolt. She rolled in mad delirium through the streets, yelled the blasphemies in the shuddering ears of Ballybay, fought the police who came to arrest her, developed, in short, into a raging demon. Her face became bloated, her expression horrible to witness. One day, as she passed through the streets in one of these frenzies, she met Mat Blake. She shivered in every limb, and a pang, as from the thrust of a dagger, passed through her heart. But she attempted all the more to steel her nerves, and to harden her face. She raised her eyes and glared, but the eyes fell, and she slunk away.
And thus it was that Mat saw, for the first time since his return to Ballybay, the gentle, timid, lovely girl who had once willingly stood between him and death.
A few minutes afterwards, Betty's mother appeared. Her features bore the traces of the deepest grief that had yet assailed her. All pride had gone from that once imperious face; she was a stooped, shame-faced, old woman. As Mat looked at her there rushed before his memory the many momentous hours of his life with which that face was bound up, his days of childhood in her prosperous home, his association with her daughter, and the glad hours during the first election of Crowe, when life was still full of glorious hope, and she had dashed the glad vision with the first breath of suspicion and anticipated evil.
They looked at each other silently for a moment, and then she shook her head, and with a look of infinite grief in her eyes, said to him—
"Ah, Master Mat, it was the hunger did it; it was the hunger did it."
By a trick of memory Mat recollected that these were the words he had heard on that day, long ago, when Betty had rescued Mary and himself from the enraged bull.
One thing Mat had noticed as Betty Cunningham had passed; it was that amid the wreck of her beauty one feature still remained as strangely witching as ever. The soft eyes had not lost their delicacy of hue, nor had the evil passions of her soul deprived them of their gentle look. Those who mentioned her, and she was not an uncommon topic among the men of the town, still spoke of Betty's beautiful eyes.
At last there came a temporary change in her fate. A branch of the Mary Magdalene Asylum was established in Ballybay for the rescue of fallen women, and she was one of the first to enter. But her temper, spoiled by excesses and disappointment, fretted under the restraint. She quarrelled with the nuns, and one night she fled. Then the revival in all its fierce vigilance of the old spectre of eternal punishment made her more infuriate than ever. She drank more deeply, cursed more fiercely, was oftener in the police-cell, and Ballybay loathed her more than ever.
One morning—it was a Christmas morning—Mat was walking with his father in the "Big Meadows." Snow had fallen heavily the night before; and as they passed a bush, they saw the impress of a woman's form; it was evident that an unhappy being had there spent her Christmas Eve.
"My God!" said Mat, "a woman has slept there."
Mat's father was the kindest and most humane being in all the world, but "Serve the wretch right!" was his comment.
Her story wound up in a tragic climax. One night she made more violent resistance than ever to the attempts of the police to arrest her, and when she was at last captured, she was torn and bleeding. They put her into a cell by herself; she could be heard pacing up and down with the infuriate step of a caged tiger. The policeman on duty afterwards told how he had heard her muttering to herself, and that he thought he caught the words, "These eyes! These eyes! They have undone me! They have undone me!" Soon afterwards he heard a wild, unearthly shriek that froze his blood. He rushed into the cell, and there, horrible, bleeding.... But I dare not describe the sight.
Betty Cunningham was taken once more into the Mary Magdalene Asylum. Her voice was trained, and after some years she sang in the choir. A strong hush always came over the chapel when her voice was heard. People still told in whispers the terrible story of the blind lay sister; and Mat, sitting in the chapel years afterwards, was carried over the whole history of her career and his own and that of Ballybay generally as he listened to her rich contralto singing second to the rest. He had always thought that there was something wondrously pathetic, at least in sacred music, in the voice that sings seconds, and the impression was confirmed as he listened to the blind girl's accompaniment to the other voices; low when they were loud, sad when they were triumphant, following painfully their quicker steps with that ever plaintive protest and soft wail—fit image of life, where our highest joys are dogged by sorrow's quick and inevitable step.
Conclusion next month
Charity's mantle is often made of gauze.
Alone
"Canst thou watch one hour with me?"
How long since fell these words from Thee?
Before Thy blood-wept vigil in dark Gethsemane,
How many since to Thee have bent the knee?
And yet too few, for here, O Lord! art Thou;
Deserted? No! for angels crowding to Thee bring
Sweet, holy homage to their God, their King.
While—as Thy chosen ones forgetful slumbered—
Thy people passeth on the road unnumbered,
With never a thought of Thee, O God, beside.
'Tis well, O Lord! 'tis well for human kind,
Thy love is ever wondrous, great and wide,
Thy heart with golden mercies ever glowing,
Thy reaping not always Thy people's sowing.
Desmond.
A Midnight Mass
From the French of Abel d'Avrecourt, by Th. Xr. K
In the height of the Reign of Terror, my grandmother, then a young girl, was living in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. There was a void around her and her mother; their friends, their relatives, the head of the family himself, had left France. Mansions were left desolate or else were invaded by new owners. They themselves had abandoned their rich dwellings for a plain lodging-house, where they lived waiting for better times, carefully hiding their names, which might have compromised them in those days. The churches, diverted from their purpose, were used as shops or manufactories. All outward practice of religion had ceased.
Nevertheless back of a sabot-maker's shop in the Rue Saint-Dominique, an old priest who had taken up his father's humble trade, used to gather some of the faithful together for prayer; but precaution had to be observed, for the hunt was close, and the humble temple was exactly next door to the dwelling of one of the members of the revolutionary government, who was an implacable enemy of religion.
It was then a cold December night; midnight Mass was being celebrated in honor of the festival of Christmas. The shop was carefully closed, while the incense was smoking in the little room back of it. A huge chest of drawers on which a clean, white cloth had been spread, served as altar. The priestly ornaments had been taken from their hiding-place, and the little assembly, composed of women and a few men, was in pious recollection, when a knock at the door, like that of the faithful, attracted attention.
One of the worshippers opened the door; a man hesitatingly entered. The face was one to which all were unaccustomed in that place. To some, alas! it was a face too well known; it was that of the man who had in the public councils shown himself so bitter against gatherings of the faithful, and whose presence, for that reason, was more than ever to be dreaded at such a moment.
Nevertheless the majesty of the sacrifice was not disturbed, but fear had seized on all the attendants; did not each of them have reason to fear for himself, for his family, and for the good old pastor, in even greater danger than his flock?
With severe, but calm, cold air, the member of the convention remained standing until the end of Mass and communion, and the farther the ceremony progressed, the more agitated were all hearts in the expectation of an event which could not but too well be foreseen.
When all was over, in fact, when the lights were hardly extinguished, the congregation cautiously slipped out one by one; then the stranger approached the priest who had recognized him, but who remained stoically calm. "Citizen priest," he said, "I have something to say to thee."
"Speak, my brother; how can I be of service to you?"
"It's a favor I must ask of thee, and I feel how ridiculous I am. The red is coming up into my face and I daren't say any more."
"My bearing and my ministry nevertheless are not of the kind to disturb you, and if any feeling of piety leads you to me—"
"Eh? That's exactly what it isn't. I don't know anything about religion; I don't want to know anything about it; I belong to those who have helped to destroy yours; but, for my misfortune, I have a daughter—"
"I don't see any misfortune in that," the priest interrupted.
"Wait, citizen, thou shalt see. We people, men of principles, we are the victims of our children; inflexible towards all in the maintenance of the ideas which we have formed for ourselves, we hesitate and we became children before the prayers and the tears of our children. I have then a daughter whom I have reared to be an honest woman and a true citizeness. I thought I had formed her to my image, and here I was grossly deceived.
"A solemn moment is approaching for her. With the new year, she marries a good young fellow, whom I myself selected for her husband. Everything was going right; the two children loved each other,—at least I thought so,—and everything was ready for the ceremony at the commune, when, this evening, my daughter threw herself at my feet, begging me to postpone her marriage.
"Surprised at first, I lifted her to her feet.
"'What! you don't love your intended?' I asked her.
"'Yes, father,' she replied, 'but I don't want to get married yet.'
"Pressed with questions on this strange caprice, she finally confessed her girlish idea. She wanted to wait, hoping that a day would come when she could get married, and have her union blessed in the church. My first burst of anger having passed, I cannot tell you all the fine reasons she gave me to obtain from me a thing so contrary to my rule of conduct. The marriage of her dead mother had been performed in the church; her memory required that pious action; she would not think herself married if it was not at the foot of the altar; she would prefer to remain single the rest of her days.
"She said so much, mingling her entreaties and tears with it all, that she vanquished me. She even showed me the retreat which a few days ago I would not have discovered with impunity to you all. I have come to seek thee out, and now I ask thee: Thou hast before thee thy persecutor: wilt thou bless according to thy rite, the marriage of his daughter?"
The worthy priest replied:—
"My ministry knows neither rancor nor exclusion; I am glad, besides, for what you ask of me; only one thing grieves me, and that is that the father should be hostile to his daughter's design."
"Thou mistakest: I understand all sentiments. That of a girl who wants to be married as her mother was, seems to me to be deserving of respect, and just now, I saw, there is something touching which I cannot explain in your ceremonies, and it has made me better understand her thought."
A few days later the same back shop contained a few intimate and conciliating friends who were attending a wedding. We need not say that from that day, whether through change of principles or through gratitude, the member of the revolutionary government was secretly the protector of the little church which could live on in peace, unknown to its persecutors.
The Hero of Lepanto
Part II
"Every nation," it has been said, "makes most account of its own, and cares little for the heroes of other nations. Don John of Austria, as defender of Christendom, was the hero of all nations." He was the hero of "the battle of Lepanto which," as Alison remarks, "arrested forever the danger of Mahometan invasion in the south of Europe." As De Bonald adds, it was from that battle, that the decline of the Turkish power dates. "It cost the Turks more than the mere loss of ships and of men; they lost that moral force which is the mainstay of conquering nations."
It is not necessary in this sketch of the life of Don John, to enter into any details about the tedious negotiations which preceded the coalition of the naval forces of Spain, Venice, and the Pope. Suffice it to say, that repulsed from Malta by the heroism of the Knights of St. John, the Turks next turned their naval armaments against Cyprus, then held by the Venetians. Menaced in one of her most valuable possessions, the Republic of Venice, too long the half-hearted foe of the Turks, turned in her distress, for help to the Vatican and to the Escorial. St. Pius V. sat in the See of Peter. He turned no deaf ear to an appeal that seemed likely to bring about what the Roman Pontiffs had long desired—a new crusade against the Turks. Philip the Second, ever wary, ever dilatory, more able than the Pope to assist Venice, was less ready to do so. Spain would willingly have done what she could to destroy the Turkish power, but her monarch was not sorry to humble Venice, even to the profit of the infidel. So diplomatic delays and underhand intrigues delayed the relief of Cyprus, and the standard of the Sultan soon was hoisted over the walls of Famagusta—to remain there until replaced in our times—thanks to the wisdom of a great statesman—by the "meteor flag of England."
The terror caused by the fall of Cyprus, brought about after many negotiations, a league between the Republic, the Papacy, and the Spanish monarchy. A mighty naval armament was to be gathered together, and its commander was to be Don John of Austria. His success in subduing the Moriscoes naturally designated him, in spite of his extreme youth, for this high command. His operations, indeed, had been so far chiefly on land, but in the sixteenth century, a man might one day command a squadron of cavalry and on the next, a squadron of galleys. General and admiral were convertible terms. There was, indeed, some division of labor. Sailors navigated and soldiers fought the ship. And, as there is more resemblance between the row-galleys of Don John's epoch and the steam driven vessels of our times than there is between these and the ships which Nelson and Collingwood led to victory, perhaps we shall return to the old state of things and again send our soldiers to sea!
To return, however, to our hero, who has meanwhile subdued the Moriscoes and returned to Madrid before setting out to take command of the great fleet at Messina. One, however, there was who did not return with the Prince to Madrid, one who was no longer to be his "guide, philosopher, and friend." The faithful Quijada had been struck by a musket-ball in a fight at Seron, in which Don John himself, in rallying his troops, had a narrow escape. After a week of suffering, the brave knight expired in the arms of his foster-son, February 24, 1570. "We may piously trust," says the chronicler,1 "that the soul of Don Luis rose up to heaven with the sweet incense which burned on the altars of St. Jerome at Caniles; for he spent his life, and finally lost it, in fighting like a valiant soldier of the faith."
Before relating the episodes of the great victory of Lepanto, it will not be inopportune to glance at one of the great evils, that of slavery, which the Turkish power entailed on so many thousands of Christians. Nowadays, thousands of travellers pass freely, to and fro, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal, and from one part of the Mediterranean to another. Our markets are supplied with fruits and vegetables from Algiers. Our Sovereign has no fears, except as to sanitary arrangements, when she sojourns on the northern shores of the Mediterranean. A cruise in an unarmed yacht on its waters is the pleasantest of pastimes. It is, therefore, hard for us to conceive what three centuries, nay, even three generations since, were the fears of those who dwelt along the coast of Southern France, of Spain, and of Italy, or, who, as pilgrims, merchants, or sailors navigated the blue waters of the inland sea. Every year, even after the battle of Lepanto, and still more before it, the corsairs of the northern coasts of Africa scoured the Mediterranean and carried into captivity hundreds of Christians, of all ages, nations, and of both sexes, from vessels they encountered or from villages along the shores of France, Italy, or Spain. Hence it is, that to this day, those shores are studded with the ruins of castles and forts, erected as defences against those corsairs. So great was, however, their boldness that even as late as the seventeenth century, Algerian pirates ventured as far as "the chops of the Channel."
When we read the annals of those religious orders devoted to the redemption of captives, we can more fully realize the terrible extent to which the Christian slave trade was carried by the infidels. As Englishmen, we do well to cherish the memory of Wilberforce. As Catholics we should not forget the religious men who risked all, slavery, disease, and death, to rescue Christians from the chains of slavery. Let us recall to mind a few facts about them. One single house of the Trinitarians, that of Toledo, during the first four centuries of its existence, ransomed one hundred and twenty-four thousand Christian slaves. The Order of Mercy, during a similar period, procured freedom for nearly five hundred thousand slaves. As to the number of slaves in captivity at one time, it may be mentioned that Charles the Fifth released thirty thousand by his expedition against Tunis, and about half as many were set free by the battle of Lepanto. It was estimated that in the Regency of Algiers, there was an average of thirty thousand slaves detained there. As late as 1767, in Algiers itself, there were two thousand Christians in chains. Of such slaves many were women, many mere boys and girls. And as late as 1816, Lord Exmouth, after the bombardment of Algiers, set many Christian slaves free. It is, as we said, hard to realize that in times almost within the memory of living men, Christians toiled in chains for the infidel, in the way some may have seen depicted by pictures in the Louvre. Similar pictures are kept in the old church of St. Giles, at Bruges, where a confraternity existed for the redemption of captives. This association is still represented in the parochial processions, by a group of children. Some are dressed as white-robed Trinitarians, leading those they have redeemed from slavery. Others are gorgeously attired as Turkish slave owners; others represent Turkish guards, leading Christian slaves, coarsely garbed and bound with chains. Happily Lepanto made such sights as these the processions of Bruges commemorate, of less frequent occurrence, until at length they have been relegated to pageantry, and the once powerful Turk is simply suffered to linger on European soil, because the jealousies of Christian nations will not allow of his expulsion.
Salamis, Actium, Lepanto and Trafalgar are the four greatest naval battles of history and of these Lepanto was perhaps the greatest. Salamis turned back the invasion of the East; Actium created the Roman empire; Trafalgar was the first heavy blow dealt against a despotism that threatened to strangle Europe. Lepanto, however, saved Europe from a worse fate—the domination of the Turk. The name of this great victory is derived from the picturesque town, with its mediæval defences still left, of Naupaktos which the modern Greek designates as Epokte, and the Italian as Lepanto. The engagement, however, was in reality fought at the entrance of the Gulf of Patras, ten leagues westward from the town.
The facts of the fight of the seventh of October—a Sunday—of the year 1571, are so well-known, that we need merely recall to the memory of our readers the leading features of the contest. Spain, Venice, Genoa, Malta, and the Papal States were represented there, but "the meteor flag of England" was not unfurled in sight of the Turkish, nor were the fleurs-de-lys to be seen on the standards that gaily floated from the mast-heads of the great Christian armada. England, alas! was in the clutches of a wretched woman, and France was on the eve of a St. Bartholomew's Massacre, and for all that France and England cared, at that time, Europe might have become Mahommedan.
Don John led the centre of the long line—three miles in length—of galleys, while on his right, Doria the great Genoese admiral, from whose masts waved the cross of St. George; and on the left, the brave Barbarigo, the Venetian, his flank protected by the coast commanded. Against the wind, the sun shooting its bright rays against the ships, the Turkish fleet, in half-moon formation, two hundred and fifty great galleys and many smaller craft, carrying one hundred and twenty thousand men, slowly advanced "in battle's magnificently stern array." The brave Ali Pacha led the van.
As the hostile fleets met, the two admirals exchanged shots. At noon, the Christians, among whom was one of the greatest soldiers and one of the ablest authors of that age—Farnese and Cervantes—knelt to receive absolution from their chaplains, and then rose up to fight. In many a quiet village away in the Appenines, or in the Sierras of more distant Spain, the Angelus was ringing, and many a heartfelt prayer was aiding the Christian cause, then a wild cry arose from the Moslem fleet and "from mouth to mouth" of the cannon the "volley'd thunder flew." The combat deepened and became hand to hand. The two admirals ships grappled together in a deadly struggle. Don John, foremost in the fray, was slightly wounded. At a third attempt, Ali Pacha's galley was boarded, captured, himself slain, and the Standard of the Cross replaced the Crescent. Victory! Victory! was the cry from one Christian ship to another. In less than four hours, the Turkish ships were scattered, sunk, or burning, until darkness and storm drove Don John to seek shelter in port, and hid the wreckage with which man had strewn the sea. The Christian loss was eight thousand, the Turkish four or five times greater. Don John hastened to console and comfort his wounded. Did he not, perchance, visit, on his bed of suffering, the immortal Cervantes? After the wounded, he turned to his prisoners, whom he treated with a generosity to which the sixteenth century was little accustomed.
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